


i can’t wait to be your number one

by lovealwayskatie



Category: High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (TV)
Genre: F/M, lots of shenanigans, some partying, youtuber!ricky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:54:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24581149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovealwayskatie/pseuds/lovealwayskatie
Summary: Ricky Bowen has more than twelve million YouTube subscribers, a Teen Choice Award for Standout Social Media Star, and sweatshirts with his face on it. / in which Ricky is a famous YouTuber and Nini is his childhood best friend turned personal assistant
Relationships: Ricky Bowen/Nini Salazar-Roberts
Comments: 22
Kudos: 168





	i can’t wait to be your number one

**Author's Note:**

> i basically began working on this in what feels like a different lifetime but here we go! 
> 
> title is from “best friend” by rex orange county, and lyrics within are from “david dobrik” by smalltownhollywood and jason locricchio. for ricky's video style, think a mix of david dobrik & co. vlogs and elle mills.

_Bring the whole team, vlog the whole thing_

_Trash the whole neighborhood_

_Then put it on the Internet just to say I could_

Ricky Bowen has more than twelve million YouTube subscribers, a Teen Choice Award for Standout Social Media Star, and sweatshirts with his face on it. He lives in a $2.5 million hillside home in Los Angeles, which Architectural Digest toured last September for their own channel, and he has his own brand collaboration with Vans, which he considers to be his greatest professional achievement at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

But before any of that, he was a first grader with a bright, gap-toothed smile and wispy brown curls moving in next door to the Salazar-Roberts’ household, a middle school-aged permanent fixture at the sole skate park in the greater Salt Lake, and Nini’s platonic freshmen year homecoming date, sporting caramel-colored highlights and an ill-fitting blazer.

By now, her friendship with Ricky dates fifteen years plus, but she still remembers the first video camera that his mom gave him on his sixteenth birthday, the last of his birthdays she was in town for before his parents’ separation and ultimate divorce. She remembers Ricky carrying the camera around with him everywhere, shoving it in her face. Her eventual insistence that he share his videos with someone other than her for a change. The first of his videos that went viral, on brand in its recklessness: SKATEBOARDING OFF THE ROOF OF MY HOUSE.

She had no idea how those things were going to be the beginning of everything.

“How’s the video for Thursday going?” Nini asks from her seat at Ricky’s—their, she corrects herself—kitchen table.

On her laptop, she has a spreadsheet outlining each video they have in the works, marked by its current status: pre-production, filming, post-production plus a calendar of when each video needs to go live on his channel. The document is shared with Ricky’s community manager, Carlos, who moderates the YouTube comments, helps draft social copy, and provides social media counsel for all of Ricky’s channels.

From her seat, she can see Ricky and Ashlyn, the video editor that R Bow LLC. hired this past winter to help manage the slate of post-production work. They have a laptop between them, working through video edits together on the living room couch.

“It’s going,” he calls back.

Almost a year ago now, she’d been two months out from graduating NYU with a degree in music composition and no immediate next steps when it came to employment or an actual paycheck when Ricky’d asked her to join R Bow LLC. The team, at the time, had just been Ricky, his grumpy business manager, Mazzara, and his perky publicist, Jenn. But he was racking up more than five million views per video consistently and needed more help with the brand.

Because, yeah, her best friend since childhood was a _brand_ , and he wanted her to be a part of it.

Hesitant, she’d asked, “As what? Your personal assistant?”

“Consider it project management.”

“The project being your life,” she’d reiterated, and he’d shrugged sheepishly.

Three days after graduating, she’d packed up her tiny New York studio and moved across the country, moving in with Ricky and Big Red, their friend from back home who had followed Ricky to California straight out of high school.

When she arrived, she swore up and down that living in Ricky’s house was temporary, tried to insist on paying rent—“Nini, I own the house,” he’d argued, and the unspoken notion that he also signed her paycheck passed between them before she relented—but now, it’s been months and she’s still here. She’s not even looking to move anymore. Even if she still can’t think of it as their home, it still feels like _a_ home, a central landing pad that provides her with the comfort of home wrapped up in the two boys among an increasingly chaotic life.

And chaotic is an understatement—from the off-the-wall stunts and cinematic moments Ricky incorporates into his vlogs to the exposure the public now has into her life, even as a separate entity from Ricky. Her presence in the crazy, silly videos about his life have garnered her two million Instagram followers of her own, and after the most recent Streamy Awards, there’s Getty images of her with Ricky and Big Red on the red carpet.

(She’d met Jenna Marbles that evening and stumbled through a British-tinged introduction, because she’s watched her videos every Wednesday, slash Thursday since middle school and couldn’t believe it when Jenna recognized her back.)

She’s not entirely sure how she’s fallen into the life that she’s living, but she knows that, when it comes to Ricky, in the same way that she learned to when they were kids, you can only hang on tight and go along for the ride.

\---

“Alright,” former Disney Channel star, E.J. Caswell, announces as he enters Ricky’s home, his Gucci slides slapping against the hardwood floors. From her spot on the couch, Nini cuts Ricky, whose sprawled on the floor playing on his phone, a look that reiterates for the hundredth time that he really shouldn’t have given their friends their own keys to the house. “What are we doing today?”

Ricky’s videos feature a large cast of characters, dubbed Ricky’s Renegade by viewers. The full R Bow LLC. team makes appearances due to sheer proximity, but there are even more over-the-top personalities that show up regularly: beauty YouTuber and one of Nini’s closest friends in L.A., Kourtney, professional dancer Gina whose made a name for herself as a dance trendsetter on TikTok, and the most over-the-top of them all, aforementioned ex-child actor, E.J. Caswell, who more often than not serves as the butt of every joke. Honestly, Nini’s still not sure how exactly he became a part of the group, but nonetheless he’s in the kitchen every morning like clockwork, eating her Honey Nut Cheerios.

Ricky drops his phone on his face as he moves to sit up. “Let’s drive around. I’ll see who’s free.”

A lot of his videos start like this.

He texts each of his friends, asking who is free for the day. If he has a prank or a stunt or something planned out, that takes the entire day, but other times, they’ll sit in L.A. traffic for hours, Ricky behind the wheel because he finds it impossible to be in a car that he’s not driving, with his camera set up on the dashboard, recording their conversations for hours as they run errands, roll through fast food drive-thrus, sing along to the radio, anything. Ricky wants to capture the funniest clips, however miniscule, to include in the succinct videos of his days, and he sees the opportunity for content in anything.

“Gina’s free,” Ricky says minutes later, and he gets up to take Nini’s laptop out of her reach, his way of telling her that she’ll be coming along today. “She needs to pick up a prescription at CVS, so we’ll go there first. Big Red, we’re heading out, come on!”

“I call any seat but the bitch seat!” E.J. scrambles off the couch, racing to Ricky’s car in order to avoid being stuck in the middle seat.

That day, E.J. winds up in the bitch seat anyway and Ricky gets a clip of the other boy wiping out on the linoleum floor of CVS when he doesn’t see the yellow wet floor sign, one Gucci slide flying off into a display of candy bars. They finish the day in a McDonald’s parking lot, Ricky and Nini sharing a 10-piece nugget meal in the front seats, debating the merits of each dipping sauce.

He points directly at the camera lens, his audience, when he says, “Comment below if you prefer ranch, or if you, like Nini, have no taste.”

\---

**@rickybowen: i love my job**

_@ejcaswell: i love ur job too lol_

_@ky.lees: post a new vid im begging you_

_@rckyxbwn: adopt me into the renegade pls_

\---

When she first moved to L.A., she didn’t know how to act around everyone. Gina had greeted her with a big hug, telling her, “We’ve heard so much about you!” and she found it a little unnerving, like they were all watching, waiting for the monkey to dance based on whatever far too generous things Ricky had said about her.

She stuck to Ricky initially, partly as a personal assistant and partly as a best friend, on the couch, at every party, in every video—until Big Red needled her into opening up to the rest of the group, encouraging her to spend time with the others one-on-one. “You know that Ricky will keep you all to himself if you let him,” he told her.

She knew that was true. They’d always been like that around one another. Ever since they became friends as kids, they traveled on the same wavelength, and once you’ve been in another person’s life for so long, not just seeing them through the highs and lows but feeling those same emotions alongside them, you begin to grow together, intertwined into one another’s lives: histories, habits, quirks, everything.

She’d grown up with Big Red, too, of course, the quintessential red head in their golden trio, but her friendship with Ricky was one of the closest relationships she had, period.

She took Big Red’s lead, though, and established a weekly routine of coffee dates with Carlos, sipping oat milk lattes and allowing him to play around on her Bumble profile. She went to one of the dance classes that Gina taught, and when that kicked her ass all the way to Pasadena, asked her to get pedicures instead, a nice stationary bonding activity. She let Kourtney test out her new eyeshadow palettes on her, giving her face over as a canvas, and she watched The Office for hours on end with E.J. until each member of the Renegade was someone that she truly called a friend of her own.

\---

She brings Ricky with her to the Farmers Market one afternoon, preferring to buy organic when she can, and he trails along behind her as she looks over the fresh produce. She misses the bagels and dollar pizza slices of New York, but nothing compares to the avocados in California.

“Neens,” he says, and she looks up to see him mimicking sticking a carrot up his nose, smiling at his own stupid joke.

She settles him with a disapproving look, and he straightens up, putting the carrot down and crossing his arms, hands clasped, behind his back to stare at her, unblinking, a smile still playing at the corners of his lips.

Their staring contests began in elementary school, back when she was the only one between them who had the attention span to win, and they still haven’t outgrown them. Now, his eyes bore into hers, trained over the years, and she takes the time to recount the gold flecks that she can catch in his deep brown eyes that day. She’d never tell him, but that’s usually her trick to beating him.

“Oh my gosh, that’s Ricky Bowen!” The loud, girlish whisper comes from behind her, and Ricky’s gaze shifts when he hears his name.

Nini bags up her avocados in triumph as a teenage girl comes over, giving Ricky a nervous, braces-filled smile.

“You’re Ricky, right?” she asks, and Nini spots a set of parents observing them from a safe distance.

“Yeah,” he answers brightly. “What’s your name?”

“Emilie.” The girl shifts back and forth on the balls of her feet before asking, “Can I have a picture with you?”

“Of course,” he agrees easily, like always, and slides an arm over the girl’s shoulders.

She’d asked him once, shortly after she’d moved here, the first time she’d been out with him when a fan approached, if he ever wished he could still be anonymous and not have to deal with being recognized in public. Having been his friends this long, she knew that while he was definitely a magnetic person to be around, Ricky was also introverted, worn thin at the end of his days when he finally laid himself out on the couch, watching movies in silence with Big Red and herself. But he shrugged and told her that he still felt really grateful to even have fans, people who supported the weird and wonderful career that he’d made for himself, and that it almost never took much for him to offer a small ounce of kindness, a smile, a photo, to them in return.

Nini offers to take the picture, snapping several before giving the girl her phone back.

“You’re so funny in the videos,” Emilie says, and Nini blinks, taking a moment for it to sink in that she’s speaking directly to her.

“Oh! Um, thanks,” she says. She knows that she usually takes on a more straight-faced role on Ricky’s channel, the voice of reason among the antics. She gently elbows Ricky beside her. “Gotta do what I can to keep up with everyone.”

\---

Whether she likes it or not, Ricky’s off-kilter sleep schedule and frequent habit of staying up late enough to hear the birds chirp their morning greetings, the sun lightening up the California skies, has crept into her own life.

She squeezes in between Ricky and Big Red, since it’s just the roommates tonight, in Ricky’s bed among his mounds of pillows and fluffy duvet. She loves all of her friends, of course, but there’s something nice about when it’s just them, like they’re back in middle school, piled onto the couch in Big Red’s basement watching old Nick-At-Nite episodes of Clarissa Explains It All and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

And true to middle school, Big Red is the first to doze off, somewhere between two a.m. and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, his head warm and heavy on Nini’s shoulder, and when she catches a glimpse of Ricky’s own eyes drifting close, she asks quietly, careful not to stir the 140-pound space heater on her other side, “Do you want to go to bed?”

Ricky blinks sleepily at her, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head, drawstrings tightened around his chin to keep it in place. “Probably should, yeah,” he mumbles, and then a yawn escapes his mouth.

Before she can move to drag Big Red and herself to their respective rooms, Ricky’s hand finds hers under the blankets, rooting her in place. “But stay?”

His hand is warm, and it feels like even further back than middle school, like it’s kindergarten when you can freely hold someone’s hand, not in a romantic way but just because you want to and don’t yet know that you’re supposed to feel embarrassed for wanting to.

“Okay,” she agrees. It’s not exactly like she has a lot of wiggle room to leave, anyway, sandwiched between the two boys.

When she wakes up in the morning, the heavy cloud of sleep dissipating as the sunbeams stream in through the window, Big Red’s commandeered half of the bed as his own, and she’s pressed close to Ricky, facing one another as they share a pillow, almost nose to nose, his hand still holding hers.

\---

Ricky insists on a weekly team dinner, including Mazzara and Jenn, and this Tuesday, they order Chipotle, eat off paper plates, and circle back to the same argument that they’ve been having all week.

“I don’t understand why you won’t consider the brand deal with Gucci,” Jenn says, shaking her head at her burrito bowl.

Ricky rolls his eyes. “We literally make fun of E.J. for those ridiculous shoes he has on a weekly basis. How would that look if I’m suddenly partnering with them?”

“It’s fifty thousand for a single post on Instagram,” Carlos says, and his words aren’t unkind, simply stating the fact of the matter. “I have a hard time believing you’ll find a better deal.”

Jenn points her fork at Carlos and nods, seeming grateful that someone is on her side.

Mazzara shrugs and says directly to Ricky, “You still have a day to make up your mind.”

Since Nini’s been around, they don’t fight over business decisions often, typically agreeing when a partnership is or isn’t a fit, because Ricky long ago made his stance known on what decisions felt in or out of line with the Internet presence and following he’s built. She usually tries to stay out of these conversations when they do occur, though; it’s not like this is what her background is in. They all know that she has the job that she does out of Ricky’s trust in her as a person, not her financial acumen or branding expertise.

Still, she feels compelled to chime in this time when she sees the frustration in her best friend’s furrowed brow. “Ricky’s right.”

Everyone at the table turns to look at her, and she resists the urge to cram her burrito into her mouth and pretend like she never said anything. She catches Ricky’s open expression, the crease in his forehead gone, and she continues, “We make fun of E.J. for being a brand hoarder all the time, and besides, is it really a right fit for his audience? What teenagers can just go out and drop a couple thousands on Gucci?”

“Fine,” Jenn says, clipped, throwing up her hands in defeat. “Gucci’s off the table. Doritos, on the other hand. . .”

She feels a foot brush against hers underneath the table and glances up at Ricky, seated directly across from her. He gives her a small, grateful smile.

Later, when everyone’s left, they’re cleaning up the kitchen, Nini packing up all the leftover guacamole, hoping that Big Red will be onboard for guacamole toast tomorrow morning for breakfast, when Ricky says, “Thanks, by the way, for the Gucci thing.”

She lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug. “No big deal,” she says, but knows that from the look on his face, he clearly thinks otherwise, so she adds lightly, waving a hand in the air, “But feel free to remind everyone how you would be completely lost, unable to live without me, etcetera and all that.”

“I could live without you,” he replies. The words sting a bit when they hit her, and even though she was joking, she looks away quickly, snapping the lid of the Tupperware container securely into place, but his hand covers hers, his long fingers stilling her movement and requiring her to look up at him again. His eyes are light, and she counts one, two, three gold flecks in them before he says, “But I would never want to.”

\---

One night, it’s past midnight when she hears a light knock on the door followed by a muffled, “Nini?”

She moves her laptop off her knees, shutting it. “Come in.”

He has a Giants cap on, his messy hair escaping and curling over his ears, and he’s wearing the fuzzy socks dotted with sausage dogs that she bought for him after he kept stealing hers.

“I had a video idea,” he says, and he settles onto her bed, stretching out his legs. She pushes his feet away when they touch her pillow but nods, allowing him to continue.

Even before she moved out here as part of the R Bow LLC. team, he used her as a sounding board for his ideas. She grew accustomed to waking up to dozens of texts from him at all hours with whatever video concept popped into his head: some good, some terrible, almost all insane. If anything, she’s grateful that she’s now able to listen to his cracked-out ideas live, sitting together on her bed, versus the string of incoherent messages that he sent her.

His eyes are bright, excited in the only way he gets about his videos, when he asks, “You know how they have those T-shirt cannons at sports games?”

\---

**@ETonline: WATCH Ricky Bowen use a T-shirt cannon to fire $10,000 checks and merch at fans outside their homes**

_@bowarmy: i want to k word myself he is a king we dont deserve_

\---

Nini’s on the couch, her legs dangling over one of the arms, and her friends are gathered in the living room, save E.J. who has an audition for a musical adaptation of Drake and Josh this morning.

“A grinder? You’re seriously telling me that you’re out and about when you suddenly get a craving for Subway, and you turn to your friend and say, ‘Let’s go get _grinders_?’” Carlos asks from his spot beside her.

“Yeah,” Big Red says, but his response reads more like _duh_. “What do you call them?”

“Hoagies, obviously,” Ashlyn supplies, not even looking up from the video thumbnail that she’s working on in Photoshop.

“Hoagies?” Big Red and Carlos spit out at the same time, incredulous.

Kourtney rolls her eyes from her place on the floor. “Who even _are_ you people?”

Ricky strides into the living room then, clapping his hands together, and announces, “I know what we’re going to do today.”

“Okay, Phineas, and what would that be?” Carlos deadpans.

Kourtney snorts and doesn’t even look up from her phone, but Nini watches a mischievous grin spread across Ricky’s face and has a sinking feeling that she knows where this is going.

An hour later, they’re gathered in E.J.’s backyard, waiting for him to get back from his audition to see that his living room furniture is now on his roof.

\---

**@rickybowen: coacHELLA ready for the best weekend**

_@kourtney: never say that again_

_@rickys__renegade: stay safe, drink lots of water, wear sunscreen!!_

_@carlosrodriguez: not pictured: you inevitably getting lost for 7 hours_

\---

Coachella is basically Kourtney’s Christmas. Weeks prior, she requires everyone to send her photos of what they plan to wear, because as she puts it, “I refuse for anyone in my group to be caught dead wearing a culturally insensitive getup from Fashion Nova, okay? Not that I don’t trust you all to dress yourselves but. . .”

Her gaze lingers on E.J., and they all do as she says.

They rent a house together in the Valley, and cramming all eight of them into one space for a weekend goes exactly how she thinks it will: Big Red and Ricky almost shatter the flatscreen TV in the living room twenty minutes after they arrive, E.J. is somehow left in charge of grocery shopping and comes home with almond milk and more alcohol than they can possibly consume, and Kourtney takes over the bathroom to do everyone’s makeup each morning, kicking out Big Red when he begs her to let him pee.

“You look hot,” Kourtney tells her after applying one last coat of mascara ahead of their first day.

Nini tries to smile at the compliment but catches herself pulling a grimace. Festival trends aren’t exactly her go-to every day look which largely consist of leggings and oversized hoodies she’s swiped from Ricky over the years, or even her typical outfit for a night out, where she opts for high-waisted jeans and her scuffed combat boots. But she reminds herself that this is like putting on a costume, like when she did theatre in high school except, she’s not dressed as, you know, a tree or a spoon. She briefly regards herself in the bathroom mirror. Gina has done her hair in two long French braids down her back, and her see-through black crop top, dotted with tiny gold stars, shows off the bralette that Kourtney picked out for her to wear underneath.

Ready for the day, she heads into the kitchen to see Ricky eating a pudding cup for breakfast. He has a bandana tied around his head to keep his hair off of his forehead, causing the curls to flop every which way, and an old Coldplay T-shirt from when they’d seen them in concert back in high school. When he looks up at her as she enters, he stills, and the spoon falls out of his mouth.

“You look. . .” He points dumbly to his own eyes, referring to the gold eyeshadow look Kourtney’s done on her eyelids—“to make your eyes pop,” she’d told Nini as she’d worked, the handle of a blush brush stuck behind her ear—and then his eyes flicker over her sheer top, then her short, denim cutoffs before he slowly draws his gaze back up meet hers. “Nice.”

She shivers a little, definitely because of all of her exposed skin in the overly air-conditioned house, and tugs on the hem of her shorts to pull them down an inch more. “Thanks.”

He blinks, and it seems to dawn on him that there’s a spoon still at his feet. He picks it up and tosses it in the sink in an easy motion, not looking over at her again.

“Can you help me?” she asks, holding out the hot pink VIP wrist band in one hand and her opposite arm. She hasn’t been able to snap it into place around her wrist one-handed, and he nods, taking the plastic strap. He wraps it around her wrist, securing it at the tightest notch, and his fingers are calloused where they brush against her skin. Looking up at him through her eyelashes, she sees his focus trained on his hands around hers, a single curl hanging over his bandana, and she has a brief, inexplicable urge to push the offending lock back into place.

E.J. enters the kitchen, blue-tinted sunglasses already on even though they’re still indoors, and a floral, short-sleeved button up that he’s left mostly buttoned down, exposing more of his chest than Nini’s ready for at ten a.m. “Are we ready to rumble, Renegade?”

“Ew,” Gina says, her nose scrunched up, as she approaches them from the opposite end of the house. “I thought we all agreed not to refer to ourselves as that when no cameras are on.” Her crochet halter dress exposes her long, lean dancer legs, and she steps in between Ricky and Nini before hopping onto the kitchen counter, kicking her legs out back and forth, introducing a physical divider between them.

It’s the sweatiest, drunkest, weirdest, most exhausting weekend of her life. After day two, she’s blistered and burned and has desert dirt in places she didn’t think possible, and she knows her moms would chide her when she, after a day out in the sun and not nearly enough water, she accepts the Corona and lime that Gina passes her that evening when they’re all gathered around the pool.

Big Red floats by on a pizza inflatable, his shoulders already verging on lobster red from the day spent outside, and Ricky swims up to where Nini’s sitting on the edge of the pool, her feet dangling in the water. When he emerges from beneath the surface right in front of her, he spits up the water in his mouth, letting it dribble down his chin. If that isn’t evidence enough that he’s still tipsy from day drinking, the goofy smile and glazed expression he’s sporting would do him in. He tugs lightly on one of her ankles and catches her gaze with his own, his grin going lopsided now that he’s caught her in one of their staring contests.

She manages to keep her eyes on his until, out of her peripheral vision, she sees the sweep of freckles that have developed across the bridge of his nose from the sun, and she gets distracted wanting to count them.

On the last night, Nini is ready to burst like a balloon filled with too much helium, because all she’s been waiting for the whole weekend is the final headliner, Kacey Musgraves. Before the show starts, everyone is sprawled out on the patchy, brown grass, exhausted from walking and standing and dancing in the desert.

“Will someone come with me to try to get to the front?” she asks, her voice leaning into pleading territory.

E.J. groans loudly, hanging his head back to look at the dusk sky, the first stars beginning to pop out in the pink-streaked sky. Kourtney and Ashlyn pointedly look at Ricky, so Nini takes their cue, giving him the biggest doe eyes that she can muster.

He opens his mouth, and she briefly thinks there’s a protest on his lips until he nods. “Yeah, of course,” he says, sticking out a hand, and she squeals in delight when she helps him up.

“Let’s go,” she cheers and doesn’t give him a moment to change his mind, pulling him in the direction of the stage.

Once they’ve navigated their way through the throng of people, Nini tries to make a small space for them but winds up directly in front of Ricky, giving him a view of the stage over the top of her head, her shoulders skimming lightly against his chest, solid and warm behind her. When the concert starts, given their position and forced proximity, he wraps his arms around her shoulders and leans some of his weight onto her, rocking them back and forth in time to the beat.

She loves Kacey Musgraves, could write a dissertation on the lyrical perfection of the album, Golden Hour—in fact, she _has_ written said dissertation, during her senior year at NYU—and for all the times that she’s put the album on in the car with Ricky, he knows most of the words, too.

Still clinging onto her, exhausted and delirious, he tucks his chin into the crook of her neck, earning a giggle when he noses at her cheek, and his breath tickles her ear as he sings, “Soft to the touch, feels like love, knew it as soon as I felt it.”

\---

“I don’t think this is going to work.”

“Carlos, dude, don’t be a buzz kill.”

“These shoes are new—Gina, call me when it’s safe to come back outside.”

“Ricky, please be careful.”

“I always am!”

“Please—”

“One!”

“Oh, God.”

“Two!”

“This is going to be epic.”

“Three!”

They all stand in silence, watching the four-foot plastic volcano that Ricky’s set up in his backyard, filled with twenty liters of Coca Cola and now, an entire package of Mentos that he’s tossed into the crater opening, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s eerily quiet with everyone frozen in place, the only noise being the distant thrum of L.A. traffic and a helicopter buzzing in the background.

Until.

“Do you hear something?”

“E.J., I’d step back—”

A spray of fizz shoots straight up into the air, and while they all severely misjudged the range the eruption might have, soda hits E.J. in the face full blast, causing him to stumble backwards, hands over his eyes, until he trips over the hammock, falling and twisting in the cloth material.

An unharmed camera in hand, Ricky laughs beside her, a little bit manic, a lot a bit in disbelief, and she watches his soda-soaked hair drip, a fat drop running down his cheek.

“That was awesome,” he says, his brown eyes light and gleeful, his smile featuring a set of dimples, and as fondness seeps through her bones, she can’t help but think of the silly, wonderful kid that she first befriended with an exchange of names and watermelon Ring Pops on the front stoop of her home.

\---

_Ricky Bowen uploaded_ **PAYING OFF HER STUDENT LOANS**

“What’s up, guys? Today is one of my favorite kinds of videos to make, because now that it’s graduation season, I heard from one of you guys about the incredible work that your sister, Anna, has been doing at USC and with The Trevor Project, so my friends and I wanted to give her a grad gift that I think she’s really, really going to like.”

_help why are my eyes sweating_

**_  
_ ** _When she started crying, I literally start to tear up. Ugh, Ricky is really one of the most genuine YouTubers and deserves every bit of success that comes his way. I wish more people on this platform were as generous and kind._

\---

Gina drags Ricky into learning the latest trending TikTok dance to “Toxic,” and Nini winds up filming the thirty-four attempts that it takes for Ricky to nail the final body roll in time to the beat. When he does so successfully, she’s still recording when he lets out an excited yell, flinging his arms around Gina and smacking a kiss onto her cheek before they both dissolve into laughter.

Later, after Gina’s uploaded the video at what she deems an optimal posting time, she laughs at her phone screen and pokes Ashlyn in the side. “Look at these comments,” she says, holding out her device for the other girl to see.

“Imagine the potential of this power couple,” Ashlyn reads, and Gina rolls her eyes, passing the phone to Nini beside her. She watches the clip and sees that Gina didn’t cut out the final part, their celebratory hug and kiss on the cheek.

“As if,” Gina continues. “I would never date Ricky.” She turns to where the boy in question is curled into the arm chair and tosses out a flippant, “No offense.”

He gives her an annoyed look. “Offense taken.”

Nini swallows and holds out Gina’s phone to her.

“I wouldn’t date _any_ of you guys, please,” she continues, taking her phone back and scrolling through the rest of her post notifications.

“Not even—”

Kourtney cuts in. “E.J., I think you already know the answer to that question.”

\---

She travels with him to New York City for a week for a publicity junket that Jenn orchestrated, and it’s her first time back to the city since graduating college. They’re on a tight schedule, one that she’s been entrusted to keep Ricky, too, but he insists that she take him to her favorite bagel place immediately after their airplane lands.

They manage to sneak in time to explore in between filming interviews, shuffling from the Hearst to Conde Nast buildings, and on their last night, he asks someone to take a photo of them in Times Square, pulling her close to his chest as the bright lights of the billboards dance behind them.

\---

_Glamour uploaded_ **Ricky Bowen and Nini Salazar-Roberts Take The Ultimate Friendship Test**

Youtuber Ricky Bowen and his assistant and childhood friend, Nini Salazar-Roberts, take the ultimate friendship test. From their first impressions of each other to keeping up with one another’s best dance moves, these two prove that sometimes the only thing that best friendships need is a good sense of humor.

_WIRED uploaded_ **Ricky Bowen Answers The Web’s Most Searched Questions**

Ricky Bowen takes the WIRED Autocomplete Interview and answers the Internet’s most search questions about himself. Where is Ricky Bowen from? Does he play any instruments? Was he in a Super Bowl commercial? Ricky answers all these questions and more!

_Delish uploaded_ **Ricky Bowen Reveals Worst Prank Gone Wrong In This Sour Candy Challenge**

YouTube star Ricky Bowen visits Delish to play Suck It Up where we put him to the test to find out who his favorite member of the Renegade is, if he’d ever shave his head, and pranks gone wrong—all while eating Warheads, Toxic Waste, and the most sour candy in the world: a Delish creation.

\---

Gina’s the youngest in the group, and the day before she turns twenty-two, Ricky gives her an early birthday card to read aloud in front of everyone: _Happy birthday, Gina! We leave_ _for Vegas in three hours._

Everyone promptly loses their shit, and Ricky gets it all on camera.

Their friends tear out of Ricky’s house to go home and pack, screaming and screeching, the countdown to the weekend officially on, and before she can sprint out the door, Kourtney yanks on Nini’s arm, asking, almost accusing, “Did you _know_?”

Nini shrugs, a smile on her face. She may or may not have booked the private jet.

After a whirl of half-packed suitcases, Ricky speeding to LAX, and an awestruck Carlos whispering to himself over and over, “You only see stuff like this in the movies,” they all climb onto their plane, and E.J. has LMFAO blasting and a bottle of champagne popped before they even get off the tarmac.

\---

_@ejcaswell: catching flights, not feelings_

_@bigred: what happens in vegas…no seriously, what happens?_

_@kourtney: f is for friends who do stuff together for @ginaporter’s MF BIRTHDAY_

\---

They stay at the Bellagio, and despite herself, Nini tips her head back to marvel at the colorful glass ceiling, set in floral patterns, until Kourtney pulls her along to the suite that the girls will be sharing across the hall from the boys.

For the night of Gina’s actual birthday, they get ready together to the sound of Taylor Swift’s “22” on repeat before going out to the club where Nini’s reserved bottle service for the group. Kourtney insists on doing everyone’s makeup, and Gina insists on a round of tequila shots before anyone even has eyeliner on, leaving Nini sputtering when she downs her shot without a chaser.

“Neens, you look so hot,” Gina says later once Kourtney determines her look is complete.

She feels a little like a disco ball, her black sequined dress reflecting back the overhead lights of their hotel room, but Kourtney insisted that she looked incredible in the fitted dress, refusing to let her skip out on wearing it.

Gina tugs on her wrist, forcing her to turn, and gasps. “Kourt!” she exclaims. “Look at her butt.”

Kourtney pauses putting on her deep purple lipstick to stare, and Nini tries to wriggle out of Gina’s grasp, her cheeks heating up with all eyes on her or, even worse, her ass.

“It’s a great butt,” Ashlyn chimes in from where she’s curling her hair, and Carlos, who ditched the other guys five minutes into Call of Duty, makes a noise of agreement.

“Okay,” Nini drags out the word, squirming away from Gina and tugging down the hem of the dress. “I think that’s enough.”

E.J. bursts into their suite shortly after, Big Red and Ricky following dutifully behind. The ex-Disney star has on a cow-printed button up and makes his entrance with a loud whoop and finger guns pointed in Kourtney’s direction.

Kourtney stares at him for a long moment. “I just don’t know what more I could possibly do to help you.”

They pregame for a little longer, Nini mixing vodka and a bottle of overpriced Sprite from the mini-bar, which feels entirely too much like a college dorm room pregame before she would wind up at an overcrowded apartment party, but she keeps drinking in pursuit of being firmly not sober by the time they leave. Carlos conducts a full-on photoshoot with Ashlyn while Gina duets with Taylor about feeling happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time, and Nini does feel a pleasant buzz, warm through all of her fingers and toes, by the time the group heads out.

The music is thumping through the floors of the club when they arrive, laser lights crisscrossing over the crowd of people dancing, and they all pile on top of one another in the booth of their table, Gina coercing everyone into two rounds of shots back-to-back in honor of her turning twenty-two. Nini loses track of what the girl’s excuse is when she gets everyone to do a third round, though.

Gina and Carlos are the first to dip out to the dance floor, and before he goes, Carlos calls back to the group, “I expect to see all y’all’s asses on the dance floor in the next ten!”

It takes more than ten minutes, but eventually, her friends peel off to dance until she’s left back with Ricky, passing a bottle of champagne between them.

“Thanks for helping with this weekend,” Ricky says, handing the bottle back to her.

She knows that she’s past the point of buzzed, officially setting up residency in the neighborhood of drunk, by the way her head feels light and unfocused. She watches Ricky’s lips when he talks to catch what he’s saying, but it’s hard to hear him clearly over the music, so she scoots closer to him, pressing her shoulder into his, before lifting the bottle to her lips again.

The DJ bleeds the current song into the next, and holding the bottle close to her chest, Nini’s eyes grow wide at the familiar beat of a song that’d been a staple at every NYU party she’d been to. “I love this song.”

Ricky turns to her, and she notes that he looks a little dopier, a little more gone than earlier. “Yeah? Do you want to dance?”

She nods emphatically, and he stands, holding out a hand to her. She follows him, not letting go of his hand as he squeezes past those on the fringe of the dance floor until they make a small space for themselves deeper into the crowd. As the chorus hits, she screams the lyrics, “So, baby, pull me closer in the backseat of your Rover,” and when the beat drops, Ricky jumps up and down, his arms going everywhere, and she can’t help laughing as she dances at how noodley he looks with his loose, free-for-all flailing.

As the singers promise that they aren’t ever getting older over and over, Nini bounces in place to the reverbing piano notes as they build, and she repeatedly pushes her hair out of her face with a huff, unable to get it to stay out of her way. Ricky takes this as an invitation to thread both hands through her hair and muss it up even more, a drunken, lopsided grin on his face. She wrinkles her nose at him but doesn’t swat his hands away from her hair yet, his fingertips soothing on her scalp. Maybe this is why he’s always asking for someone to play with his hair.

Someone from behind bumps into her, pressing her closer to Ricky, and when she trips over her own feet, she braces herself by placing her hands flat on his chest.

To her muddled brain, it feels like the music’s been suddenly turned down to inaudible levels, or maybe she’s lost her auditory sense in favor of touch, because the feeling of his hands laced through her hair and the feeling of his heart pounding out of time to the song under her palm now sound deafening in her ears.

It feels like any of her surroundings outside of Ricky, who is right here all up in her space, are moving half-speed, threatening to fall away entirely. She can’t focus on anything but him inching closer, infinitely slow, and his heartbeat, or maybe its hers, is too unbearably loud, nearly drowning out the buzzing need to know what kissing Ricky would be like. She can’t remember ever thinking about kissing Ricky before, but she doesn’t know why not. He’s cute with his staring contest-worthy eyes and messy, floppy hair that she figures would be so, so nice to touch, and surely, there’s no way she _hasn’t_ thought about wanting to kiss this boy before. Their noses brush, distance practically negligible at this point, his lips almost touching hers—

When the music cuts out this time, it’s for real, and it’s more jarring than whatever feeling overtook her moments before, the sudden change washing over her like a bucket of cold water.

“Next up, we have a special request for a birthday girl,” the DJ says, his voice projected through the club through his staticky microphone. “Word on the street is Gina Porter is turning twenty-two tonight.”

There’s a din of cheers, including a scream that Nini’s able to pick out as distinctly Carlos’s, before she hears the opening guitar strums of “22” for the millionth time that night.

“I did that,” Ricky exhales, and while he’s not within kissing reach anymore, he’s still close, sounding out of breath. She can feel his chest expand under her fingertips as he inhales deeply.

She looks back up at him, so close and still entirely in her space, and whatever that was or almost was is certainly, solidly, definitively gone. She just wishes the flush that has spread up her neck and across her cheeks would disappear with it.

“We should probably go find everyone,” he says quietly, removing his hands from her hair.

“Yeah.” She edges herself back, dropping her hands to eliminate all points of contact between them, and repeats, “Yeah.”

\---

_Ricky Bowen uploaded_ **SHE WASN’T READY FOR THIS BIRTHDAY SURPRISE**

\---

She’s working at the kitchen table, ordering dry ice in such large quantities that she knows Big Brother is going to flag her IP address any day now, as Carlos scrolls through Ricky’s mentions on Twitter.

“God, I can’t wait until Ricky’s on Buzzfeed’s Thirst Tweets,” he says, angling his computer screen towards her to see a Tweet that says: _Can Ricky Bowen sit on my face, like please god, please akdjrnwd_

Her eyes go wide as Carlos scrolls through a few more explicit requests for Ricky to spit down their throat or wanting to suck his big toe—in which case Nini’s half-tempted to reply back telling them that they truly don’t want to go anywhere near his feet or the unpleasant smell that permeates from the entirety of his Vans collection.

Her “wow” feels heavy in her mouth, and she swallows thickly before turning back to her own computer screen, her spreadsheet swimming in front of her. She’s tried her hardest to suppress it in the weeks since the trip, so she thinks that it’s pretty sick that her mind, of its own accord, marches down the avenue of being a fraction of a second away from kissing Ricky in Vegas, so close to learning how he would kiss her and how she would, evidently more than willingly, kiss him back. Her body fizzles at the thought like Mentos in Coke on the verge of eruption, and when she stands quickly, pushing her chair back, it nearly topples over.

Carlos gives her a weird look, and before he can ask, she blurts out, “I think I need to pee.”

“Alright, well,” he says, an eyebrow raised. “This isn’t class, so no need to raise your hand.”

She gives him a stilted laugh and spins on her heel, disappearing into her room in order to shove her face into a pillow.

\---

Big Red flies home to Salt Lake one weekend to visit his parents, and the house is still quiet when she wakes up, though Ricky sleeping in late is hardly anything new. She makes breakfast, enjoying her Honey Nut Cheerios untouched by E.J.’s greedy hands. She goes to an early yoga class, stretching and shaking out the tension in her shoulders that’d set in over the work week. When she returns to the house, Ricky still hasn’t emerged, so she showers, changes, watches Kourtney’s latest video on the new Morphe palette, waters the philodendron plant that she’d insisted they get when she moved in.

And then, when that’s accomplished and he hasn’t emerged, she gives up and knocks on Ricky’s bedroom door.

She hears grumbling from inside and considers that her warm and welcoming invitation to come in. When she cracks open the door, she rolls her eyes when she sees that he’s still in bed, the covers pulled over his head. “Do you plan on joining the living today, or. . .”

He grumbles again, muffled under the blankets, and she yanks on the corner of his duvet, revealing a bleary-eyed Ricky that’s mostly a bad case of bed head. He gives her a dirty look, like a petulant child on the precipice of a tantrum, but shifts to be in a more upright position. “Are you happy now?”

Nini takes a seat on the edge of his bed. “What do you want to do today?”

“Nothing,” he answers flatly. “I need a break from filming. I already told everyone.”

“Okay,” she says slowly. “You realize that you can do something with your day without it being for a video, right?”

They wind up going to Santa Monica Pier, just the two of them. Parking’s terrible and ridiculously expensive, and most of the pier is bustling with tourists, but Nini’s actually never been, so she’s genuinely excited to explore. It’s a nice day out, still summery even though they’re well into September—though, it’s not like she’s experienced much bad weather in L.A. since moving here regardless of the calendar date. They wander through the arcade games in Pacific Park, and at some point, she swipes Ricky’s sunglasses off of his face to wear, hers forgotten in the car.

For a late lunch, they sit at the counter of the old-fashioned soda shop and split an ice cream sundae.

“I feel bad,” Ricky says suddenly, dragging his finger to trace over the swirly pattern on the countertop. She tilts her head, confused, and he continues, “I don’t want to seem ungrateful.”

When it clicks that he’s referring to his sour mood earlier and refusal to work on his channel today, she softens and sets down her spoon.

“I know that I don’t exactly have a hard job and that I’m lucky that I get to do what I do. But sometimes. . . I don’t know. I don’t know what else I would do with my life, for a job, anything. I never really had to think about it.”

When they were kids, Ricky was the reckless one—not a huge surprise. He would spend hours trying out new tricks on his skateboard, compete with the other kids in their neighborhood to see who could climb higher up the tallest tree on the block, get on top of the monkey bars and flip upside down, holding on with just his legs. Nini was always there, watching from a safe distance, trying not to gasp when he came too close to falling, too close to hurting himself. And when he did hurt himself, whether it be a skinned knee or sprained wrist, she usually ended up being the one to cry, not Ricky. Her moms assured her it was because she was sensitive—which is a _good thing_ , they insisted—and that she had a nurturing spirit. But really, she was only ever like that for Ricky, and as they got older, it surpassed his physical injuries. When he hurt emotionally, her heart ached, like they are tethered together by a magnetic force, and she had no control over not also feeling what he was feeling at all times.

“I think it’s okay to think about things like that,” she tells him. “It doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful.” She gives him a small, reassuring smile. “Trust me, I’m paid to spend time with you, and you’re nothing but kind to everyone who watches your videos.” He rolls his eyes, but she continues, “But your life isn’t normal, so I don’t think it’s crazy that you would think about what it would be like if it was.”

He digs his spoon into the sundae, the utensil clinking against the bottom of the glass dish, but before he takes a bite, he says, “I think that’s why I offered you the job. I knew that if you were here too, it would feel more normal, I guess. More like home.”

He gives her a soft smile, and it makes her feel all soft and doughy inside, like an under baked cookie that he could pull apart without even trying. She kind of can’t look at him when he says stuff like this, redirecting her gaze at the cherry that’s sloped off the scoop of vanilla, and she definitely can’t unstick the words from the back of her throat to tell him how much he means to her as well. Instead she teases, “Obviously, I knew you back when you were the lowly _Richard Bowen_.”

When he laughs, she catches a smear of hot fudge in the corner of his mouth, and she hates that she knows exactly what he’d taste like if she kissed him right now.

Which she wouldn’t.

But still.

After the sun has began to set, reflecting onto the surface of the ocean, the Ferris wheel overlooking Santa Monica lights up rainbow, and Ricky needles her into riding. Since it’s his day to be cheered up, she relents but finds herself holding her breath when they get strapped into their small passenger car, lined up from shoulder to hip to knee. It’s not like she considers herself scared of heights per say, but she wouldn’t say that she actively likes them either. It’s a tenuous relationship at best.

In order to let the next duo into their passenger car, the operator turns on the ride, sending them jerking backwards, and startled, Nini grabs onto the closest thing to her which, in this case, is Ricky’s thigh. They raise into the air slowly before coming to a halt again, and she can see a father and son climb into their seats.

“Um, Nini?”

She turns her head and sees that she’s digging her nails into his leg, harder than she had meant to.

“Oh!” She retracts her hand quickly and then, unsure what to do with it, scratches her neck, rubs her nose and then finally, clasps both hands together and folds them in her lap. “Sorry.”

“Here,” Ricky says, an amused smile turning up the corners of his mouth. He has his left hand held out, palm up, and it takes a beat for her to realize that he’s offering it for her to take.

“Ah, uh—” She hesitates before placing her right hand in his, pressing their palms together. “Thanks.”

He intertwines their fingers, and she’s acutely aware of how his warm palm feels against hers, where her fingertips brush against his knuckles, and the easy, seamless way he laced their fingers together. “If you could just try to ensure that I get off this ride with all five fingers intact, that would be great,” he adds.

She shoves his shoulder with her free hand, and he scrunches up his nose at her, crossing his eyes until it makes her smile.

\---

When they get home that night, it’s late, but Ricky’s still wide awake, like a little kid that she shouldn’t have let eat as much sugar as they did that day, so they agree to watch a movie as long as she gets to pick.

He rolls his eyes but puts on her requested Mamma Mia, and she pulls on the old Ricky Bowen merch sweatshirt that he tosses to her before they lean back in his bed.

He grumbles within the first bar of “Honey, Honey,” burying himself further into his pillows, and she pokes him in the side. “Don’t lie, you love ABBA.”

He shoots her a dirty look, but when she’s falling asleep only a third of the way through the movie, her eyes drifting shut against her will, she hears him humming along to “Dancing Queen.”

\---

E.J. Caswell shows up in her dream, which is made up of technicolor Ferris wheels and an ocean of hot fudge. “Is this one of their pranks?” Dream E.J. says, and she stares at him, unable to follow what he’s talking about. “Because I don’t think I get it.”

“Oh, sweetie, no,” she hears a second voice say. Except it’s not just a second voice—it’s Kourtney’s voice.

She spins in a circle, trying to find Kourtney, but she’s not here. . . which would make this not a dream. Which would mean that E.J. is. . . also actually here.

She forces her eyes open and sees a sleeping Ricky facing her, breathing evenly. They’re both on opposite sides of his bed, heads on separate pillows, not touching, but in his sleep, he has outstretched one of his arms, his fingers reaching towards her.

Her friends’ voices are gone, and she spares a glance to see that Ricky’s bedroom door is closed. A spark of hope shoots through her at the chance that she had actually been dreaming, and she rolls out of bed to return to her own room.

She’s made it two steps when she sees E.J. and Kourtney on the living room couch and Ashlyn and Carlos, laptops in front of them, working at the kitchen table.

It’s not a good look. The sweatshirt she’s in is his, obviously so from the way that it swallows her up, hanging down to her thighs, and she’s clearly just woken up. And by the single raised eyebrow that Kourtney gives her, Nini knows that they’d seen her in Ricky’s bed anyway.

“Nothing happened,” she says in the exact kind of tone that a person would have if something did indeed happen.

No one says anything, apparently content with staring at her in various stages of shock, confusion, and accusation, and she takes the four steps it takes to cross to her room, closing the door firmly behind her.

She doesn’t come out of her room for a while until she ducks out to the backyard for some fresh air and an escape from how suffocating her room was beginning to feel knowing that all of her friends were outside the door, sitting, insinuating. Within minutes, Kourtney and Ashlyn accost her where she’s lounging on the hammock, ripping the book that she’s reading out of her hands.

“Hey!”

“What the _fuck_ , Nini,” Kourtney says as the two climb into the hammock.

In a split second, she commits to playing dumb, keeping her voice even when she says, “What?”

Kourtney rolls her eyes. “What were you doing in Ricky’s bed?”

Nini opens her mouth but quickly snaps it shut. She doesn’t exactly have an answer for that, at least not one that she thinks will appease them. But she does have an answer for the larger, unspoken question she knows they’ll continue to dance around. “Nothing happened,” she swears, and she means it. She hadn’t even made it to “Lay All Your Love on Me,” and that’s her favorite scene. “He’s my boss.”

Ashlyn winces. “Not helping your argument.”

Nini settles both girls with a look and tries a different route. “He’s my best friend. We grew up having sleepovers.”

“Yeah, most people stop doing that once they realize that they want to fu—”

Nini makes a strangled noise to interrupt her. “No.” She points at Kourtney, like she’s snapping at a misbehaving puppy, and Ashlyn closes her hand around the accusatory finger, lowering it back to Nini’s side. “No,” she repeats, the sharpness in her tone duller now. “Sometimes, on a rare occasion, I will fall asleep in Ricky’s bed when we’re watching a movie together. It’s not a big deal. Sometimes, Big Red’s there, too.”

Ashlyn crinkles up her nose. “Again, not really helping your argument.” But she sighs and edges away from her and closer to Kourtney. “But if you say nothing happened, we believe you. Right, Kourt?”

Kourtney mumbles something inaudible, and Ashlyn elbows her in the side. “I mean, er, yes, of course.”

Ashlyn continues, “Therefore, I would hope that when—” Nini gives her a dirty look. “ _If_ , I mean, if. If something were to happen between you two that you would feel comfortable telling us.”

Nini shrugs. “Yeah.” It’s easy to promise something that she knows is never going to happen. “Sure.” She holds out a hand expectantly, and seemingly satisfied, Ashlyn gives her back her book.

\---

**@rickybowen:** I WON A PEOPLES CHOICE AWARD. This is crazy. I mean seriously. You all have showed my friends and me so much love, and I don’t think anything will ever top that. I don’t think I can ever say thank you enough but THANK YOU!

_@caswellsricky: YOU DESERVE IT MWAH_

_@aintthatbowen: king shit ily_

\---

He calls her when she’s halfway to Whole Foods, his voice panic-stricken when he tells her that she needs to come back to the house immediately.

She’s already U-turned before she asks, adopting his frantic tone, “What happened? Did Big Red super glue himself to the banister again?”

“No, no, Big Red’s okay,” he rushes out, and he sounds like he’s panting, his short breaths crackling through the speaker phone. His voice is pleading, insistent when he adds, “But come home quick, please.”

As she drives, barely able to keep herself from going above the speed limit, her knuckles white from how tightly she’s gripping the steering wheel, she runs through her spreadsheet of upcoming videos, trying to pinpoint a prank or stunt in the works and how it could have potentially gone wrong, running through the hundreds of different scenarios that Ricky could have hurt someone or himself.

It’s L.A. traffic, so it takes her entirely too long to make it back, and she pulls into the driveway at an angle, throwing open her car door and scrambling to get out when she sees Ricky, all of their friends, and a sleek black baby grand piano sitting in the backyard. A slow smile spreads across Ricky’s face as she stares at him, frozen in place to try to understand what on Earth the emergency was.

“Happy birthday!” E.J. cheers, Ricky’s camera in his hands, but her birthday isn’t until next Tuesday.

Ricky steps towards her, away from the group, because she still can’t find her ability to move from where she’s now rooted. “I—what?”

“I figured the only way to really surprise you would be by doing it before you expected anything,” he tells her. He grabs onto her wrist and tugs her gently forward, closer to the massive piano sitting on the patio. “It’s a Steinway, Model S, and uh, all the forums said that this was a really good piano.”

She catches herself and Ricky reflected in the smooth surface of the piano, and it’s so pristine, clearly brand new, from the untouched ivory keys to the gold Steinway lettering and logo printed above.

  
In her silence, Ricky continues, “We’ll bring it inside, obviously—I mean, if you like it. Do you like it?”

She turns to look at him, a mix of excitement and nerves shining in his eyes, and instead of answering his question—because, _of course_ , she likes it; it’s the most incredible, ridiculous, over-the-top gift she’s ever been given—she throws her arms around his neck to pull him into a tight hug.

\---

“What’s the point of this video again?” Gina asks, looking at the spread of grease-stained In-N-Out takeaway bags that Nini’s set on the kitchen table.

“You sit around, eat ridiculous amounts of food, and just talk,” she explains, pulling out the cardboard boats filled with French fries and burgers tucked into their paper sleeves, spreading them out. Gina looks unconvinced, and Nini shrugs. “It’s a thing on the Internet.”

E.J. and Big Red bound into the kitchen, ready to eat, and E.J. immediately begins to shove Animal-style fries into his mouth, the special sauce getting all over his chin.

“Hey,” Ricky chastises from where he’s setting up his camera on a tripod for their mukbang. “Save it for the video.”

\---

_@ejcaswell: my mf THANKSGIVING RIGHTS_

_@kourtney: alright, let’s dial it back_

\---

The Thursday prior to Thanksgiving, they host their own, and Ricky insists on Mazzara and Jenn coming as well in order to have everyone who is a part of the channel there. Nini handles the catering for the turkey and gravy, but everything else is done potluck style, the mismatched dishes and containers of green beans, cranberry sauce, and three different kinds of potatoes lined up on the kitchen counter.

Once everyone’s seated around the long kitchen table, Ricky, seated at the head, clears his throat. “Thanks for coming, guys,” he says, and not usually one for speeches, his voice cracks a little. Nini smiles up at him reassuringly from her place on his left. “I hope you all know how thankful I am for each of you not just today but every day. I couldn’t do any of it without you guys, seriously. Ever since I moved out here, you all have become, like. . .”

“Family,” Nini finishes quietly, pinpointing not just Ricky’s sentiment but her own. She never thought this would be the place where she’d end up, but these people really have set up camp in her heart.

“Exactly.” Then he cracks a smile in an effort to clear out some of the seriousness and adds, “And now we can all stop listening to me and eat.”

\---

Christmas is Nini’s favorite holiday. She insists on decking out the house and putting up the tree the day after Thanksgiving, directing Ricky and Big Red around and telling them how to put up the lights and tinsel properly, not like _that_. She saves dozens of different cookie recipes on Pinterest to make and buys twice as much hot cocoa mix, and she queues up her Christmas Spotify playlist on a loop, and by the first of December, she has a sufficient holiday season buzz. Except.

Only Big Red plans to travel back to Salt Lake City that year. Nini’s moms are going on a cruise through the holidays and New Year but will spend a week in L.A. with her after they dock in California, and Ricky’s dad has opted to come into town to spend the holiday with him here. Of course, Ricky tells her that Nini’s going to be a part of their plans since Nini’s known Mr. Bowen for just as long as she’s known Ricky, but it still leaves her feeling a little blue. California doesn’t even get snow—what’s Christmas without snow?

It’s a gray, cloudy Wednesday afternoon when she comes home to Big Red in the backyard dressed in a candy cane striped onesie and a pointed green hat, complete with tiny jingle bells around the brim and felt elfin ears covering up his own.

“Big Red. . .”

“Welcome to the first and only opening day of the Holly Jolly Winter Wonderland Experience, brought to you by Ricky’s Renegade. And Santa. Obviously.” He gives her a bright, toothy smile, undeterred by the wide-eyed confusion laid out on her face, and he holds out his hand to her. She takes it warily and follows him inside, no amount of videos or years of friendship with Ricky having prepared her for what she’s about to see.

Inside, their living room has been transformed to, well, a Holly Jolly Winter Wonderland Experience. In the hours since she’s been gone, the living room has been transformed. More string lights and holly have been hung up, covering every free inch, and massive, inflatable snowmen and candy canes have been placed around the space. Carolers, dressed in old-fashioned garb, are singing “Jingle Bell Rock,” the entire space smells like peppermint and sugar, and in one corner, Santa Claus sits in an ornate, velvet chair, chatting with E.J. But most of all, there’s snow, actual snow falling all around her.

She sees Ricky coming towards her in a Santa hat and a thick green sweater, patterned with prancing reindeer and snowflakes, that has _Merry Christmas, you filthy animal_ stitched across his chest. “Merry Christmas!” he says, handing her a set of reindeer antlers to wear, and she accepts them, dumbfounded.

The snow falls in steady flakes and has accumulated in a thin blanket on the floor, which she now realizes has been covered in a tarp to not ruin the hardwood.

She’s not sure if she sounds shocked, in awe, or a bit of both when she asks, “What did you do?”

Ricky just shrugs, and the snow collects in his hair. “You kept saying that it didn’t seem like Christmas without snow.”

She doesn’t even know what to say, and when she looks around again, she catches even more details, like all of their friends dressed in various states of festive attire, Gina and Carlos counting down to one before tipping back the shotski in their hands, the hot chocolate bar that’s set up by the kitchen. Big Red skips up to them with a plate of gingerbread cookies.

“Do you like it?” Ricky asks.

When she looks at her best friend, cookie crumbs on his lips and snow dusting his hair, sticking to his eyelashes, she means it with her whole heart when she says, “I love it.”

\---

_Ricky Bowen uploaded_ **SURPRISING MY ASSISTANT WITH A WINTER WONDERLAND**

“In case you didn’t know, Christmas is only twelve days away, and coincidentally, it’s my assistant and childhood best friend Nini’s favorite holiday. Since neither of us are going home for Christmas this year, that means we’re missing out one very important thing: snow. So, this year, my gift to Nini is going to be turning our home into the perfect winter wonderland.”

_their friendship is everything to me, so soft and pure_

_  
Nini is literally the most adorable human being I’ve ever seen??_

_yall know theyre banging right_

\---

**@rickybowen:** here’s a small compilation of my favorite people, places, and things from the last year. thank you for making this my life!!!

\---

Everyone is over late one night in January, catching up on episodes of The Masked Singer, and E.J. rolls his eyes, gesticulating to the screen with wild, jerky motions. “The dalmatian is obviously Bow Wow, come on!”

Nini disentangles herself from Carlos and Ashlyn in order to make more popcorn, and Ricky offers to help, taking drink orders before joining her in the kitchen. She’s just placed the popcorn bag in the microwave when she catches a new addition to the refrigerator.

“Oh, God, no,” she spins to face him, pointing at him accusingly. “We’re going to have to talk about that photo being here.”

When his dad came to visit over the holidays, he brought a few things still left behind in Ricky’s childhood bedroom: a few photos, an old Christmas ornament, a Ziploc bag filled with guitar picks, a signed baseball from a Giants game.

When she hadn’t been looking, Ricky slid the photo of them from freshmen year homecoming when they’d gone together, under the “Aloha Vibes” magnet her moms sent her after their anniversary trip to Honolulu, the cringe-worthy picture now taking up a permanent residency on their fridge.

“What? I like it,” he says, his smile fond.

She turns to look at it again, studying his unfortunate highlights and crooked bowtie and her violet, ridiculously bedazzled dress and matching eye shadow that she knows might scar Kourtney for life when she sees it. From behind her, she hears him let out a low chuckle, and she glances back to give him a wary look.

“What?”

He rubs the back of his neck, shaking his head. “Nothing, I—just, uh.” He pauses. “I had the biggest crush on you when I asked you to homecoming that year.”

The words wash over her like an icy blast, not dissimilar to the time he turned a super soaker on her as she left the bathroom in order to get her reaction on camera for a video. A crush? On her? Freshmen year, he’d asked her to the dance by sneaking confetti and a note into her locker, and of course, she’d said yes. They were only a month into high school, and she was still getting lost trying to find her homeroom class, so it wasn’t like there was anyone else she’d even thought would ask her. But that dance hadn’t been romantic, not in the slightest. They’d carpooled with Big Red, driven by his mom, and they hadn’t even slow danced to the one Ed Sheeran song they’d played, Ricky opting to fidget next to her by the punch bowl instead.

Her mind fumbles for a response until she lets out a quiet, “Oh.”

His Adam’s apple bobs up and down as he swallows, and his voice is pitched just slightly higher, practically unnoticeable except it’s Ricky and she knows him too well, when he says, “Yeah. But it’s not like I do anymore. . . or anything.”

His eyes don’t leave hers, but this doesn’t feel like one of their usual staring contests, his expression unreadable as his eyes burn into hers. Under his gaze, her stomach flips in a way she doesn’t recognize—not quite like dancing to The Chainsmokers in Vegas, not quite like the Ferris wheel at the pier.

“Oh.” And then, realizing she’s already said that, she adds, “‘Kay.”

In an effort to break the eye contact, she tries to step around him to check on the microwave popcorn when she feels his fingers catch hers, pulling her back, and his eyes search her face before falling on her lips, and without thinking, she wets her bottom lip, tasting what’s left of her peach Chapstick. And that’s the last intelligible thought that runs through her mind before he kisses her.

Startled, she sucks in a breath, and he leans in closer, kissing her firmly, purposefully, like he’d been batting a question around in his mind since freshmen year of high school, and this was the answer he’s just come up with.

When her body appears to catch up with what’s occurring, she curls her fingers into his T-shirt, kissing him back, and he walks her backwards until she bumps up against the fridge. Their kisses become a little more earnest and desperate, and she lets him coax her mouth open without much insistence, both trying to know more of one another in equal measure. He’s a good kisser; Ricky Bowen _is a good kisser_ to an unfair extent, and if she had known this before now. . . She doesn’t want to and really shouldn’t finish that thought.

His lips leave hers, swollen and pink, and his eyes remain closed, his eyelashes sweeping across his cheekbones, and if she wasn’t already struggling to find air, she thinks the sight of Ricky in this new way would leave her breathless.

Her hands tremble when she releases her hold on him, and his eyes flutter open after, the expression on his face indecipherable. She wants to kiss him again, maybe wants to kiss him forever if it’d always be like that, but she can’t figure out the look in his eyes and loses her nerve.

Instead, she takes a deep breath, and the next words that fall out of her mouth are, “The popcorn’s burning.”

\---

They don’t talk about it.

Instead, a week later, she comes home from a yoga class with Ashlyn to find barnyard animals in the backyard. E.J. is taking a selfie with the miniature horse wearing a sparkly hot pink cowboy hat, and Big Red chases a chicken with grabby hands, trying to pick up the clucking bird. Ricky has his camera pointed at her, and he can’t keep the grin off his face.

Her rolled up mat slips out from under her arm, and she asks, floored, “What did you guys do?”

“Welcome home, Neens!” he cheers, and she strides toward him, requiring him to step backwards to keep her balanced in frame.

“How—why—”

A lamb bleats as it runs in between them, and she throws up her arms. She has no words.

“You know that guy Carlos has been seeing? Seb?” he says. “Turns out, he’s a great hook up for all of our livestock needs.”

She wants to tell him that they don’t _have_ any livestock needs, but a goat nuzzles its nose against her leg, and without thinking, she reaches down to pet it in between its ears.

Ricky’s smile widens, his eyes sparkling in delight at the scene in front of him, and when she feels the urge to kiss the silly smile off his lips spark through her, accompanied by the warm affection she now realizes her body responds with for no one other than Ricky, she retracts her hand from the goat, like it snapped at her.

Looking at her through the shot preview, he must see her entire disposition shift, because he lowers his camera. “Are you okay?” he asks, quiet and no longer as delighted in her apparent horror.

She dips her chin, a stilted excuse for a nod, but she’s scared that her body will betray her with any further movement. “I have to go. Shower. Wash my hair.”

She picks up her yoga mat, narrowly avoiding whacking a small, pink pig in the face with it, and ignores the confused look that Ricky gives her as she hurries inside.

\---

Okay, so she has a crush on Ricky. Whatever. She gets crushes on people all the time: the girl in her sophomore year English class that smelled like cherry blossoms and stole all the pens that Nini lent her, the barista at the Coffee Bean that never charged her extra for almond milk, the boy with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen who let her take the last carton of eggs that they both reached for at the grocery store.

Most of these crushes fade away all on their own. Granted, most of these crushes are on strangers, people she’s only gotten glimpses of versus Ricky who she knows inside and out, so it might not fade as quickly. But it will fade, she knows. It has to.

\---

She makes it a week, and then she texts Kourtney, Ashlyn, and Gina.

They gather around Gina’s kitchen table, Nini sitting stiffly with her shoulders back and tense, unable to meet the questioning glances that her friends give her.

“So,” Gina finally starts. “Why are we gathered here today?”

She makes it sound like they’re assembling over a peace treaty or a business arrangement, and Nini’s resolve immediately breaks. She buries her head in her hands, mumbling into her fingers, “I like Ricky.”

“What?”

“Nini, you gotta speak up.”

She sighs loudly and lifts her head. The words don’t feel as foreign but just as scary when she repeats them more clearly this time. “I like Ricky.”

She surveys her friends’ faces, but they remain immobile, maintaining the most stoic poker faces she’s ever seen them muster until Kourtney finally breaks the silence to say, “And?”

Nini’s heart flops in her chest. “What am I supposed to do?”

Ashlyn and Gina exchange looks, apparently coming to a silent understanding that Kourtney can take this one, because she continues, speaking very slowly and deliberately as if Nini won’t understand otherwise. “You tell him.”

“No.” She shakes her head and can’t seem to stop, repeating, “No, no, no.”

Ashlyn reaches out to place her hand on Nini’s. “Did something happen between you guys?”

Nini sucks in a breath between her teeth, fidgeting in her chair before confessing, “He kissed me.” Ashlyn and Gina look at one another again, and Nini hurries to add, “But only after he explicitly said that he had a crush on me in high school but that he doesn’t anymore. What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

The three girls across from her don’t speak, but the look on Kourtney’s face is one that she would have sworn was saved for E.J. exclusively. Several moments pass before Kourtney finally says, “So, you’re telling me that Ricky who—let’s look at the evidence—begged you to move out to L.A. because there’s no else in this world that he trusts as much as you to work for his channel, who bought you a ridiculously expensive piano for your birthday, who would bend the laws of astrophysics for you if you asked, kissed you. And you don’t know what it means? Neens, I love you, but how dumb do you have to be?”

She bites on her bottom lip, pulling it into her mouth, and Kourtney’s mouth turns downwards in a disapproving frown at Nini’s silence. “He turned your home into the North Pole.”

Ashlyn adds, her voice gentler and more encouraging, “I think you need to be honest with him.”

The way she says it, it sounds so easy, but the reality is she’s pretty sure that, with a single kiss, Ricky Bowen’s managed to take her helpless heart in his hands without her even noticing.

\---

It’s rare when none of their friends are over at the house, so she knows that, two days later, when E.J.’s the last of their friends to head out at a reasonable hour, this is the universe urging her to talk to Ricky.

She pads out to the living room, back in an old Renegade merch T-shirt, and Ricky is on the couch fiddling with the settings on his video camera, not even looking up when she enters until she clears her throat.

He looks up, his expression easy as ever. “Hey,” he says, and she can’t understand how in the weeks since he kissed her, he’s never not looked calm while she feels like her insides have turned into a pinball machine, ricocheting everywhere complete with flashing lights and loud beeps and boops. It makes her feel even less certain about what Kourtney insists is true.

She doesn’t cross over to the couch yet, fidgeting when she asks, “Can you put the camera away?”

He blinks at the request, confused, but agrees. “Sure.” He turns it off and sets it down on the coffee table at a safe distance.

“I just think we should talk,” she continues, now taking a seat on the couch beside him, tucking her legs up under her to sit crisscross. “You know. About when you. . . you know. You were there in the kitchen with the popcorn.”

And she sounds like she’s reading off the murder case in a game of Clue.

Amusement shines in his eyes, and there isn’t a hint of shyness in his smile when he asks, “When I kissed you?”

She nods slowly at the simple way he says this after not broaching the subject with her for weeks now. “Because, well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot—me and you. You and me. In the kitchen.”

“With the popcorn,” he parrots her earlier statement, and she feels a brush of annoyance at how easily he’s able to talk about this, simultaneously making it harder for her.

“Right,” she says, and while she’s chosen to barrel forward, she refocuses her line of vision onto her lap. “And I don’t know if you’ve been thinking about it, but um, it turns out that I can’t stop, and I’ve spent some time figuring out my feelings, and well. Everyone, they thought you, what with the piano and the snow, maybe do like me too—and I know you said that you don’t anymore, but if you. . . if you maybe did like me right now, present tense, then I wouldn’t be opposed—”

“Nini?” he cuts her off, and if she already didn’t find herself wanting to all the time anyway, she would kiss him right now for putting her out of her current misery. His eyes are bright, the gold amid brown even more apparent than usual. “Sometimes, it’s easier just to kiss.”

“Yeah?” she asks, her voice tiny, and he moves closer, cupping her cheek in his hand, and in response, she finds herself inching forward to eliminate any distance between them, her hands reaching for the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” he murmurs before pressing his lips softly against hers. The kiss is easy, packed with more than fifteen years of adoration and shared hot fudge sundaes and staring contests featuring golden flecks in warm, brown eyes and a single, pristine baby grand piano, and she holds him close, happy to kiss him just like this again and again.

\---

“Ashlyn, where are you taking me?” she asks, patting blindly once again at the bandana tied over her eyes.

Her friend’s hands remain firmly on her shoulders, guiding her forward. “Take two more steps,” Ashlyn says in her ear. “And then you can take off the blindfold.”

“ _Okay_ ,” she says, extending the word slowly but doing as she’s told.

Finally able to open her eyes, she blinks as her vision adjusts to the lighting—or really, the lack of lighting. Her surroundings are pitch black, save a sole spotlight on none other than Ricky in his Christmas sweater, despite it being the first week of February. He stands several feet across from her, just out of reach, and he has cue cards in his arms, a blank one facing out.

“Ricky, what are—”

Ricky holds a finger up to his lips, motioning for her to stay quiet, and he turns around the sign on the top of the stack in his hands. It reads in thick, block letters: _Say it’s carol singers._

A children’s chorus version of “Silent Night” begins to play, slow and saccharine, and she brings up a hand to stop from laughing at the quintessential Love Actually display. Ricky flips through the cards slowly, watching her with an earnest, steady gaze as she reads them.

_You’re one of my favorite people in the world,_

_And I’ve long been happy being your friend_

_Without hope or agenda,_

_But because it’s Christmas,_

_And at Christmas you tell the truth,_

_To me, you are perfect._

It’s silly, adapted from a questionable movie scene, but affection blooms in her chest regardless, her heart battering in her ribcage, and her voice is soft when she says, “Ricky.”

(She later finds out that this has been in the works for weeks, since he first kissed her in the kitchen, and the entire production—the warehouse rental, rehearsals, hiring extras—had been occurring right under her nose. Their friends swore that she would never beat him to the punch in confessing her feelings, and granted, she hadn’t exactly been eloquent in doing so, but Ricky didn’t care, so far gone for her. Still, this show must go on.)

The spotlight shuts off loudly, throwing the room into darkness, and someone cuts the Christmas music. She’s startled when she feels a hand on her arm, letting out a yelp, when new lights come on, revealing a different corner of the space. There’s a three-story metal scaffolding in front of her, and she realizes that it’s Ashlyn holding onto her, pushing her forward and up the ladder along the structure’s side.

“Climb up,” Ashlyn instructs.

Nini shoots her a bewildered look, but the girl raises her eyebrows expectantly, and Nini does as she says, muttering under her breath, “Of course, there had to be _heights_ involved.”

She makes it to the first landing when Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” begins to play, and a new light flickers on, revealing Ricky on the ground beneath her. He’s swapped his sweater for a white T-shirt and camel-colored trench coat that’s too big for him, hanging below his knees, and he holds a boombox stereo over his head, just like John Cusack in Say Anything.

_Without a noise, without my pride_

_I reach out from the inside_

_In your eyes, the light, the heat_

_In your eyes, I am complete_

(Ricky confesses to having liked her not just during freshmen year of high school but _since_ then, consistently. He’d worked hard to stamp it down in an effort to maintain the most important friendship in his life—his words—but had hopelessly, helplessly adored her. “How could I not?” he murmurs into her neck before pressing gentle kisses to her pulse point, leaving Nini shaky and equally helpless.)

He sets the stereo at his feet, sheds the trench coat, and jogs over to the staircase, climbing up two rungs at a time, and she giggles at the display of eagerness.

When he reaches her, he doesn’t climb onto the landing, still balancing on the ladder with an elbow around a rung anchoring him in place. There’s little space between them, and he reaches out a hand to trace his fingers along her jaw. He’s close enough to kiss and getting closer when he says, “You know what the best part of the fairytale is, after the prince rescues the princess from the tower?”

She hums, her lips ghosting over his, aching to kiss him, and he completes the quote from Pretty Woman on his own, “She rescues him back.”

He pushes himself away from her, leaving her chilled from his sudden absence, and continues to climb up the ladder. She gasps his name when he hooks his knees onto one of the rungs and drops his hands, hanging upside down before her like he’s back on the monkey bars they played on during elementary school recess.

He reaches out a hand, and she steps closer, their faces now in line with one another again, though his upside down and hers right side up. Call it Peter and Mary Jane or Seth and Summer, but this movie reference she knows for certain, and the music swells around them when she finally kisses him, taking his bottom lip in between hers.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he mumbles into her mouth, and she breaks their kiss in order to roll her eyes, still smiling. Ricky would have a Spider-Man kink.

(It feels reckless, falling in love with her best friend, and it takes time for her to quell the feeling of impending doom that they’ll figure out that they were actually better off as just friends but are now unable to regain what their relationship once was. But that moment never comes—instead, she finds herself falling more and more in love with him every day. After all this time, she didn’t think there was more to discover about Ricky but winds up discovering and loving these new things too: his pleading to have her play with his soft, messy curls which she now happily obliges to, his new habit of tugging her into his lap anytime they’re on the couch and keeping a hand on her thigh or knee or calf, his favorite kind of kiss which, so far, is any kind of kiss from her.)

The song cuts out, and she hears new flood lights shutter on in tune to the unmistakable beat of Hall & Oates’s “You Make My Dreams.” She sees more than a dozen people now bathed in the light below, dressed in various shades of blue. She recognizes Gina in a powder blue sundress being spun in a circle by Carlos in a steel blue blazer, and Ashlyn in periwinkle joins them, snapping along to the beat, and the rest of their friends, Big Red and Kourtney and E.J., are down there step touching in time, too.

By the time she turns back to where Ricky was, a million new questions on her tongue, he’s halfway down the scaffolding and running towards the group, taking his place in the middle of the formation, Carlos and Gina on either side.

“What I want, you’ve got,” Ricky mouths along to the song, and in unison, the group step forward right, left and swing their arms out in the opposite direction of their feet, left, right, and Nini giggles in disbelief when they all body roll in time to the lyric, “But it might be hard to handle.”

(Weeks later, he shows her the video of the entire production, quickly adding, “I don’t plan on posting it. I just wanted it for me—or for us.” It looks like an actual movie, which was, of course, the entire point. Ricky had made the most spectacular cinematic moment, and the video exemplifies just that. “You have to post it,” she tells him, acutely aware that millions of viewers will see their relationship if he does, which, yes, is scary but at the same time, his entire life—and in part, hers—is on video. How can they hide this when she can’t seem to stop touching him or, as Kourtney swears, giving him emoji-level heart-eyes? He studies her very seriously, trying to decipher her expression and gauge if she’s being truthful. “Are you sure?” She nods, equally as serious, and adds it to her spreadsheet of upcoming videos.)

Scrambling down the ladder herself now, she makes it to them by the chorus, and E.J. takes her hand, pulling her into the fold and spinning her into Ricky’s arms.

“Oh, yeah,” Ricky sings along, one hand in hers and the other on her waist as he leads them in a rotation around one another. “You make my dreams come _tru-ue_.”

And then Ricky tugs her away towards a newly illuminated spot in the warehouse studio which has a thin, plastic tarp spread on the floor. Ricky positions her directly in front of him, their hands still intertwined. He stares at her, his bright grin bringing out his dimples and the smile lines around his eyes, and when he keeps staring at her, nothing else happening, she tilts her head, a question mark etched into her features, when water begins to dump down onto them from above.

The cold water pours down, causing goosebumps to erupt on her skin, and she lets out a laugh when she sees that Ricky looks like a drowned rat, his soaked hair sticking to his forehead. He sputters, spitting up water, and droplets cling to his eyelashes as he can barely keep his eyes open. “Okay, I think this one was better in my head,” he admits.

She laughs again, earning her own mouthful of water as a result, and moves closer to him. If this is supposed to be their movie magic kiss in the rain, she figures that she better make it a good one. She threads a hand through his wet curls before pulling him towards her to kiss him, harder than before, trying her best to show how much this incredible, crazy boy who has the weirdest life in the world, means to her. As the water comes down in sheets around them, he kisses her back, unhurried, a promise that this is just the beginning, that there’s more to come—which she knows, when Ricky’s involved, that there’s always more up his sleeve for her, for them, and she can’t wait to see what’s in store.

\---

_Ricky Bowen uploaded_ **TURNING MY LIFE INTO A ROM COM**

**Author's Note:**

> whew buddy - referenced things include:  
> kacey musgraves, “velvet elvis”  
> britney spears, “toxic”  
> taylor swift, “22”  
> the chainsmokers & halsey, “closer”  
> ABBA, “honey, honey”, “dancing queen”, “lay all your love on me”  
> peter gabriel, "in your eyes"  
> hall & oates, “you make my dreams”
> 
> and the final part is referencing movie scenes from:  
> love actually  
> say anything  
> pretty woman  
> spider-man (2002)  
> 500 days of summer  
> the notebook
> 
> n e way leave me your thoughts! and also im on twitter now gross follow me i guess @lovealwayskt


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